Hi RISE Community,
Welcome to our August AMA. If you have any questions for the RISE team, please post them here and we will answer them on August 23rd 2018 at 5-6pm CET.
In the meantime, have a read of our latest blog posts on Medium: https://medium.com/rise-vision
We look forward to answering your questions!
Posted Aug 21, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC · locked
I know you guys already applied to Binance and now up to them, but what about Bittrex? Any updates from them?
We reapplied upon their request and there still has not been a yes or no, so all we can do is continue to update them with our developments.
How many FTE (full time employee putting in 40 hours a week) is working for Rise?
To clarify this question further:
How many full-time software or hardware development equivalents does Rise currently have working on the project?
I asked a question about this project a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/RiseVision/comments/6t5xyg/is_rise_dead/
The RISE developers work between 20 and 35 hours a week and myself and Andrea put in 40 hours a week. RISE is a lean team at the moment and in the current market the Founders prefer to focus on development in order to ensure the monthly burn rate is sustainable. Furthermore, the development team all have different skillsets and work on different aspects of the project, therefore in some cases the solution is not to just increase the number of hours someone works. In the future, it would make sense to increase the number of full time employees as RISE moves towards a more complete market ready solution. As stated in the current market, cost control is important for the RISE to succeed.
How much money is left from the ICO? Transparency about that with financial quarterly reports, like Lisk does, would be nice.
There have been talks about Rise selling all the Bitcoins raised in the ICO back in 2016 at a relatively low price. Is this true?
Cormac's answer - The remaining founders Steve and Cormac have ensured that Rise has more funds in fiat terms than it initially raised in 2016. There was btc that was converted to fiat back in 2016 and there was fiat that was re-converted back into BTC. At the current burn rate of approx. $30,000 per month there is currently enough to keep Rise developing for over ten years.
Rise's ICO was in 2016?? How much code is been written since ever?
You'll be able to see this in Github: https: //github.com/risevision. Also bare in mind that some repositories are private and some old discontinued repositories are have been deprecated. Github also show insights if you wish to take a look.
I think there is not a lot of ICO funding left. How come that ICO coins are so easy to get listed in Kucoin and Cryptopia? Better starts talking with Yobit again!
-What kind of tools are you thinking to support developers to use RISE? Currently there is hardly any documentations.
-Drap and drop tool is still in the scope?
-When will marketing starts and do you hire a crypto guru to expand Rise community?
-What kind of developers or users is Rise targeting? Education sector?
-Airdrop from Rise side chain is still possible (non Rise team)?
-How do you organize the hard fork, V2.0? Currently only 36 mainnet nodes are on latest 1.1.1 core
As a remark, as you cannot say anything about exchanges, I do hope you're still trying your best applying on the "traditional" exchanges like Bittrex, Poloniex, Cryptopia, Binance and Kucoin.
Marketing will coincide with development releases and when we are closer to achieving sidechains. I can't say if we'll hire a 'Crypto Guru' yet, but I do see the value in a marketing person focusing on RISE when we are closer to a more complete solution that can be taken to market.
To your fifth question, we believe yes it is possible from a third party.
-What kind of tools are you thinking to support developers to use RISE? Currently there is hardly any documentations.
We are aware that documentation is lacking now. Josè has been given the task to provide code comments that I believe is the first step toward a properly documented project.
You can check out his github branch here -> r/https://github.com/RiseVision/rise-node/commits/documentation
I've also asked him to search for a proper tool to host our future documentation that will contain both the theory, howtos and reference pages.
-Drap and drop tool is still in the scope?
No, that was a vision of the old development team. Nothing can stop us to build it but right not that's not what we want.
To your last remark a legal professional advised RISE to not communicate ANYTHING at all about exchanges (regardless of where it is located) and that is why you have seen RISE focus on development only in communications. This may seem confusing as it also was to us because so many other projects similar and dissimilar are openly discussing their availability on exchanges. The current landscape over the last 6 months has shown us to be more careful.
-What kind of developers or users is Rise targeting? Education sector?
Web developers, aspiring and experienced. RISE is built on top of well-known battle tested web technologies so i'd guess that that's our target :)
-How do you organize the hard fork, V2.0? Currently only 36 mainnet nodes are on latest 1.1.1 core
We're aware of lazy delegates. That shouldn't happen. We're discussing about introducing a new consensus change to improve fairness.
We'll account productivity as a ranking factor. In short, if a delegate skips a block he will lose some weight and eventually go out from forging.
As another improvement point we'll put a use to standby delegates by providing an incentive for them to mine blocks. The mechanisms are still not well defined but the effect of this will be a more decentralized network with more nodes running.
I see often concerns about transparency in the slack/TG chats. We often get left in the dark when it comes to information. Sometimes we do get information but it is quite vague or we get information but it is not followed up and the community start wondering if anything really happened or not. Some recent examples are the wallet testing or bounties that were started but there was not much follow up on where it stands.
I would like to know how you see things from your perspective. How does it look from your side, is there anything that can be done or you don't have enough resources? Or is it simply that you don't see the need to engage more with the community and followup?
I see the concern and we should continue doing AMAs every month, as if we had done them previously many vague areas may have been clarified. Personally, I believe there is a lot more we can do with the community. On the flip side there is more quality content about development and the project than ever before, bar the yet to be released Lightpaper. We would also like the community to help grow RISE presence in the space too, it cannot always be dictated by the team, but we will try to give you more information.
How do you plan to grow the community and when?
I think this has been mentioned in some other answers already and u/oregon-pop sent us a few ideas that we will use for sure.
If you have any suggestions please head over slack and let us know we will be glad to hear your suggestions
Are there current plans for long term team expansion?
What is the long term vision from each of you?
What is the long term vision from each of you?
IMHO RISE will be successfull when the set up of a sidechain is:
- easy
- relatively fast
- well documented
The complete fullfillments of my vision of RISE will be when new development will come from the community
Yes, for 2018 we have budgeted in for an incremental increase in team expansion. Longer term resource expansion will be determined early next year, once we have made more great progress with development.
From an operational perspective my vision for RISE is for it to be community sustainable open source project where the barriers are low enough for developers to access RISE blockchain technology.
Rise is registered as a company in Gibraltar and not as a foundation.
What revenue streams do you have in mind to be able to continue the development and support of the Rise blockchain / ecosystem?
We have discussed internally on the options available to us, whether that is securing funding from a third party or the team self funding in the future. In regards to monetisation, we have initially talked about two or three revenue streams but to be honest at the moment we want to work towards achieving our roadmap goals and then looking to bring on board a few early adopters.
Cormac's answer - Rise was registered as a company because Rise Vision PLC created to foster blockchain projects on the Rise blockchain once side tokens become available. A company was registered in order to peruse obtaining a Distributed Ledger Technology license which would give credibility to any projects that were to be built. The Bittrex delisting and SEC threats slowed progress on this aspect of Rise. Once we have sidetokens running we will look at persuing activities with Rise Vision PLC in order to nurture growth on our blockchain.
Rise has a small team but wants to support many programming languages. How can you handle that with good quality?
I really believe that quality is more important than quantity. In this stage having a big company/team could lead to some hiccups and time will be wasted for sure.
We'll grow on demand but my vision is to bring this project at a stage where community developers will take over and develop new features from there. (much like it happens for some other cryptos).
Rise is not a SEO friendly company name, so what are your plans to grow (organic) traffic to your website? A rebranding perhaps?
A rebranding was mentioned within the team, but highly effective rebrand requires a lot more thought than just a name change. Therefore, when this is a priority we would have to enlist an expert. Meanwhile, there are smaller changes and improvements we can do with regards to URL and SEO, which currently we are just finalising details on.
I would like to know more about how the information is spread internally. Are there weekly meetings to talk about news and progress or is it more of a each on your own and do the job that is expected. In particular I sometimes feel the community managers don't seem to have the information they need to engage with the community. I wonder if there is a good information flow to answer questions quickly but also to build up ideas/brainstorm around all the information that can attract and engage the community to do stuff. I have the feeling there is something missing here.
There is a combination, the development team outline their tasks, achievements and impediments daily. My role is to update the team on all other aspects so this is discussed weekly to ensure that if there are any non-technical impediments we can still achieve our goals. We are a remote team, but there is a lot of autonomy and trust. To your second point of information flow/ideas, can I ask where and how have you seen this best executed in other projects? We are open to using anything that will help us progress. Perhaps we can adopt something that works well from your experience.
you can look in to clickup (project), trello (project), jira (project), or confluence (cms)
Hi rise vision devs
thx a lot! :)
how comes you aren't moved at all that price is so long at an atl? 2)do you think that price action can actually kill a rock solid project? (i do)
Price could kill a project in many ways. nowadays i think the price is not attracting new community members (which we need). In RISE's case it hasn't stopped development.
- why were you so silent be4? we/i missed you and are happy you offer an AMA now. are you shy? :O
Speaking of myself, i was silently developing. I am not shy at all :D
- how would you rate the current state of the block chain world? what do you like? whats not to like? what could be better on the way to mass adoption? what shows you that we are on the right path?
I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg for what we'll see in the following months and years. I like a lot of things about the blockchain world. One of the most interesting things is that blockchain consensus models are a very challenging thing to create and maintain. Totally different type of development compared to what most devs are used to.We're still in unexplored territory. I believe we are pursuing the right goals.
- which crypto projects are your biggest competitors?
All DAPP platforms with sidechains are competitors. But it really depends on many things. As replied above about EOS... while we may look similar (dpos, dapp etc) we are also really different.
- which crypto projects would you like to work with to make rise (and the world) a better place?
We're exploring several partnerships but there is nothing official yet as I believe that we would first need to get 2.0 (and probably other iteration of the 2.x milestone) done.
- will you do an AMA again?
Yes
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If there is 1 thing you could change about RISE instantly, what would it be?
What are you most proud of up to this point related to the RISE project?
If there is 1 thing you could change about RISE instantly, what would it be?
I'd have the consensus model changed. Having some incentives for standby delegates. Also disincentivation of active, but not online, delegates should be created. I think there's another question where i'll expand on this topic.
What are you most proud of up to this point related to the RISE project?
The team. Everyone involved in RISE (comm managers, founders, devs, etc) is a very interesting person with different skillset and an interesting story.
On the "achievements" side we made a long way here and the core achievements are, of course, the things i'm most proud of.
“Guides for TypeScript/JavaScript, Python and C# API” is a bounty on the website for quite a while now.
Has there been any response on this? Furthermore why do you feel the need to put this up for a bounty instead or writing this yourself?
I think these types of documentation should come directly from the Rise devs , tailored to the Rise blockchain. They know the most about these topics.
Honestly, this was a nice to have suggestion from someone in the community that I asked for bounty guidance from. We know we need better documentation and we hoped that this kind of bounty might encourage a new developer to contribute to RISE.
Who is conducting the code audit and will the results be made public?
Are there any plans to try and increase community engagement? Migrating a tip bot like @risebot in Slack to Telegram would be great.
Are there any plans to try and increase community engagement? Migrating a tip bot like @risebot in Slack to Telegram would be great.
Lets say it's not in our priority to have a Telegram tip bot built but if community thinks this is a something that will help community engagement then we'll for sure go for it. (Upvote if you think its nice, downvote if not?)
Also, risebot was built from scratch out of nowhere and the whole UX was thought by me. This time we could save time if you could suggest some good telegram tipbots that we can lurk at :)
We are currently reviewing a few audit companies. Audits can cost $10k+. We want to make sure it is a proper third party audit/verification company who will give us an unbiased view. Once we have decided on the company then we will let that company share the results.
What are the roles of the members on the team page? We know what the devs and Anjalee do. We were told that MJ Demarco's advisory would come into play later. What kinds of things do Alty and McVenture work on? And what are the roles of the Ambassadors? Daniel is the only one engaging the community with any regularity.
Cormac (Alty) and Steve (Scifi.rem) make decision on exchanges, legal, commercials and agree to budget planning. Frank (McVenture) handles the support ticket system and helps with some technical aspects of the network and development. Ambassadors should be promoting RISE technology not just in online in Telegram or Slack, but also outwards to their local developer and crypto communities. Bare in mind, not everyone can focus 100% on RISE and therefore, an Ambassador role is great! We would love more Ambassadors who are developers within the community.
About Rise Website and important documents:
Some time ago, I had talked to Anjalee about the Google translation disaster. I note that only the English version currently exists:
- Are human translations (Korean, Japanese, Spanish and others) being developed for the website as well as for the coming Whitepaper, what is essential for the project's outreach? ...
Thank you.
Hi Jo, based on your previous feedback the translation API used for the website were not good at all. Therefore, we removed these entirely. We've also used some Google Analytics data to identify traffic on our website and the results show that English is sufficient for the majority. Professional technical translation is anywhere between $0.15 and $0.20 per word, therefore if we did a human language translation it would be Korean first based on the RISE community and website traffic.
What is the governance model of Rise? Will delegates be asked to vote for upcoming changes / decisions? How will those votes be recorded?
The people voting for the delegates should be able to see the detailed results and decide if they want to stay with that delegate. Highest payout is not always the most important)
What is the governance model of Rise? Will delegates be asked to vote for upcoming changes / decisions? How will those votes be recorded?
Right now decisions are taken by us. As soon as a consensus changing decision comes up we'll ask the opinion of the whole community.
If, and where, there will be some disagreement then we'll use something to record votes safely.
^^ all of this is for the time being.
In the future, since I've already stated that I strongly believe that one day RISE will be community driven, then we'll have, by then, some governance system built on rise (Or a sidechain that just stores governance decisions maybe?)
What do you think is the biggest milestone you reached and the biggest one yet to come?
I'm unsure if the biggest milestone was the rewrite in typescript or the last update (1.1.1 - read about it here ) . But i'm pretty sure that 2.0 will be the biggest one yet to come.
2.0 work is done in a private github repo mostly by me, and will include the fundamentals for an SDK and, of course, sidechains
What vision does the team have for Rise in the future when competing for market share against other blockchains that will run dapps? Will we compete directly against something like EOS or have a different target?
Will the 30 second block times effect performance compared to other chains running 10 or even half second blocks?
Is it possible to reduce or even eliminate transaction fees without spam becoming a problem in the future?
Yes, EOS and RISE both use a version of DPOS but slightly different protocols. EOS core is written in C++/WebASM and RISE core is written in TypeScript. RISE technology is primarily built for developers familiar with web development programming languages and concepts. At the foundation of any technology business and their objectives to have a DPOS blockchain ecosystem will be a developer or development team familiar with the RISE technology stack. RISE technology will be customisable and therefore, applicable across a wide range of industries and companies.
Nope. And we could always change that if community decides so.
About transactions with zero fee: that is achievable in several ways:
Both solutions have drawbacks and the latter will basically move the fees from the blockchain to your energy bill.